Comments• First Patch Release for GlassFish 3.0.1;
since GlassFish 3.0.1 is essentially also a patch release for 3.0, arguably this is the second patch release for GlassFish 3.0.
• This patch is required for extending and updating GlassFish Server installations on machines that do not have Internet connectivity.
• Users and customers interested in clustering and state replication should use
GlassFish v2
until these features show up in GlassFish 3.1.

We have identified at least one problem with this patch: the packages seem to be tagged as "3.1" instead of "3.0.1". Our sustaining group is validating the rest of the content and the package will likely be re-generated.

This restricted release raises one concern about GlassFish: will GlassFish become just like JBoss, with an open source (so-called, "General Availability") branch with few releases (most notably, only versions x.y.0 and no corrective versions) and only a commercial version which fixes even the most critical issues?

I have for example had the experience with extremely critical bugs (for example, a VFS issue resulting in the impossibility of deploying any Spring application without fixing it in a way that it doesn't work on any other server than JBoss anymore), where we then had to switch all our instances to JBoss Enterprise (made us loose another month just to requalify everything).

The GlassFish public releases are intended to be ennterprise-ready and production-quality and we run all our test suites against these releases. For each public release there will be a companion commercial release with \*additional\* (IPS) packages, but the base is the same.

Our commitment to the community is that all the fixes that appear in the sustaining releases will be accumulated and integrated back into the next public release.

We don't have a fixed schedule for public releases; it will vary depending on many factors. Right now the next planned public release will be GlassFish 3.1, which will also add HA/Cluster support. After that we know we will have a GlassFish 3.2, which is a major release, but we do not yet know if there will be 3.1.x releases and, if so, how many of them there will be. Obviously, each release has a cost, so the fewer we do, the more features we can add in 3.2.

I can point to the GlassFish v2 family history [1], but beware I cannot promise our future releases will necessarily follow the same pattern.